Expanding bicycle water bottle threaded insert that installs with a cone wrench. Printed in TPU. It barely fits in the holes in my frame but works well enough. The slot gap works quite well to allow expansion inside the frame. I embedded a M4 washer in the head section, and you can see the M4 * 6mm heatset insert. It feels pretty solid all fastened down. Using Philips head on a proper road bike though… That has got to be fixed. M4 is smaller than typical for bike water bottles, but that is already stretching what is possible for brass inserts and the available wall thickness I had for the surrounding print. Other bikes will have different dimensionality for the hole, frame thickness, and surrounding structure, so sharing the file has no real value. The idea might be useful to someone. It does seem to work and doesn’t require the special inserts and tool for installing metal inserts.
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Random hardware trivia, absorbed while managing a hardware store decades ago:
This type of object is called a “well nut.” I’ll leave it to you to come up with your own pun based on this.
Heheheh… “well”
Great idea, gentle on the fiber too
Nobody asked but I thought this was funny
I skimmed the text, looked at the pictures and then sat here for like 2 minutes trying to figure out what tf you printed and why before I realized “maybe I could actually read the text like a human being instead of divining it out the fuckin air huh?”
